Last week in Azure #21: Week of February 26

A post on the Microsoft Imagine blog (Students: Get career-ready with Azure for Students) announced the new Azure for Students offer, which gets verified students started with US$100 in Azure credits to be used within the first 12 months plus select free services (subject to change) without requiring a credit card at sign-up. For all the details, see the Azure for Students FAQ.

Now in preview

Announcing new milestones for Microsoft Cognitive Services vision and search services in Azure - Microsoft Custom Vision service, now available in public preview on the Azure portal, makes it possible for developers to easily train a classifier with their own data, export the models and embed these custom classifiers directly in their applications, and run it offline in real time on iOS, Android and many other edge devices. In addition, Bing Entity Search, which developers can use to identify the most relevant entity based on searched terms and provide primary details about those entities is now generally available on the Azure portal.

Now generally available

Confidently plan your cloud migration: Azure Migrate is now generally available! - Azure Migrate is offered at no additional charge and provides appliance-based, agentless discovery of your on-premises environments. It enables discovery of VMware-virtualized Windows and Linux VMs today and will enable discovery of Hyper-V environments in the future. It also provides an optional, agent-based discovery for visualizing interdependencies between machines to identify multi-tier applications.

StorSimple Data Manager now generally available - Transform data from StorSimple format into the native format in Azure blobs or Azure Files. Once your data is transformed, you can use services like Azure Media Services, Azure Machine Learning, HDInsight, Azure Search, and more.

Introducing Azure Advanced Threat Protection - Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a cloud-based security solution that helps you detect and investigate security incidents across your networks. It supports the most demanding workloads of security analytics for the modern enterprise. Leveraging the scale and intelligence of Azure, when we detect a new possible threat or attack method, we can automatically update all active tenants. This means that your threat detection capabilities are always up to date.

News & updates

Updates to Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL - We announced these services in preview last year, and we recently made a number of updates based on customer feedback. Changes include pricing tier tweaks, changing from compute units to vCores, flexibly configure and scale storage, and additional options for backup and geo-restore.

B-series burstable VM support in AKS now available - Burstable VM's (B-series) are significantly cheaper compared to standard and optimal recommended VM's like Standard_DS2_V2. B-series VM's are particularly suited for development and test environments where performance requirements are bursts rather than consistent.

Azure Service Bus now integrates with Azure Event Grid! - The key scenario this feature enables is for Service Bus queues, topics, or subscriptions with low message volumes to not require a receiver to be polling for messages at all times. Service Bus will now send events to Azure Event Grid when there are messages in a queue if no receivers are present.

Azure Load Balancer to become more efficient - We recently introduced an advanced, more efficient Load Balancer platform. This platform adds a whole new set of abilities for customer workloads using the new Standard Load Balancer. One of the key additions to the new Load Balancer platform, is a simplified, more predictable, and efficient outbound port allocation algorithm.

HDInsight Tools for VSCode integrates with Ambari and HDInsight Enterprise Secure Package - You can now connect HDInsight Tools for VSCode to an HDInsight cluster through Ambari for job submissions using an Ambari managed username and password, or domain username and password. The Ambari connection applies to Spark and Hive clusters in all the Azure environments that host HDInsight services./p>

Technical content

Transform your industry with new Microsoft IoT in Action webinar series - The IoT in Action webinars are a series of live virtual events for companies ready to capitalize on the multi-billion-dollar IoT market. These live and on-demand webinars show what’s possible with IoT while also educating on how to do it. Filled with IoT thought leadership and technical know-how shared by industry pioneers from Microsoft and our partners, each webinar is crafted to inspire development across the IoT partner ecosystem and help you better meet customers’ needs.

Security Center Playbooks and Azure Functions Integration with Firewalls - You can manually run a Security Center Playbooks when a Security Center alert is triggered, reducing time to response, and helping you stay in control of your security posture. This post looks at a specific example of how Azure Functions work with Security Center Playbooks to help you rapidly respond to detected threats against your Palo Alto VM-Series firewall.

Developer spotlight

App Center | Push Notifications - Learn how to engage your users by sending them targeted push notifications with App Center Push.

Your guide to Azure services for apps built with Xamarin - The Mobile apps using Xamarin + Azure poster is a one-stop guide to the most relevant cloud services that Azure has to offer to you as a mobile developer with Visual Studio and Xamarin.

Zero to App in 20 Minutes: Build Your First Chat App with Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio App Center, and Rapid - In 20 minutes or less, get your first real-time chat app up and running. In this post, you'll learn how (and why) to add “chat apps” to your StackOverflow Developer Story, GitHub repos, or [insert your preferred skills profile]. Understand basic chat requirements and what separates the good from the great. Plus, you'll get code samples and step-by-step docs to get started.

Connect 2017 | Get your continuous delivery pipeline up and running in a few minutes - Learn how to easily get up and running with your apps inside Visual Studio App Center. Sign in and connect your Android, iOS, and Windows apps to the continuous integration, automated testing, distribution, monitoring, and engagement capabilities of App Center.

Azure Friday | Remote Debug Azure Functions in Java Using VS Code - Xiaokai He shows Donovan Brown how to quickly develop and deploy serverless functions to Azure, then go inside the black box and debug functions locally, as well as remotely in the cloud.

Service updates

• February update for Azure IoT Edge
• TCP Connections added to App Service diagnostics
• GUID migration: Stream Analytics
• Public preview: Azure Backup integration with Azure Files
• Power BI Workspace Collections is being retired
• General availability: Application consistent backup for Linux VMs by using Azure Backup

Azure shows